by John Daulton
She stared for a long time out the window, her thoughts running through memories and time. She wondered if Roberto was still alive. If her father was. She hoped Asad was dead but had to take it back. He would take others with him if he died. At least by an attack on the ship. She wondered what kind of person it made her for thinking that, for wishing such hateful thoughts. Maybe Blue Fire was right. Maybe it was better if humanity was gone.
She caught herself and shook the feelings off. She liked to think she was one of the good ones amongst her race, and look where she had gone almost in the same breath in which she’d tried to argue that not all humanity was so bad. She had to keep it together.
That’s when Altin’s voice broke into her silent reverie.
“She said she’ll do it,” Altin said. “She says you are right. But first, let’s go talk to Maul.”
Chapter 33
Altin stood beneath the vast crimson dome of Citadel’s concert hall, the tentacles on the dome’s ceiling high above writhing slowly like golden snakes warming in the morning sun. He was explaining the nature of the Liquefying Stone to the Citadel mages, trying as he did to convey the nature of the danger they all now faced. Conduit Huzzledorf, seated as always on the plush upholstery of the ottoman that occupied the very center of the room, turning slowly round as it did and making him seem as if he were some crimson-clad doll on display, seemed bored and impatient to carry on. When Altin began what would have been his fourth repetition of the facts, starting once more to explain how fast the mana would come to them, the conduit could finally take it no more.
“Sir Altin,” he said, running his hands through the frizzy fringe of white hair that, if one counted his eyebrows in the mix, ringed his head nearly perfectly, “you’ve made it quite clear already. And it won’t be them casting, it will be me, so all will be well. Have Miss Pewter hand them out and let’s be on with it.”
“Not until we are there,” Altin said. He looked to Orli, who stood next to him with a small wooden chest at her feet, the container provided by High Priestess Maul at the conclusion of their visit with her in Crown City. The box held the Liquefying Stones that Blue Fire had given them. The chest was filled with eight hundred bits of the frightfully potent yellow stone, one for each mage in the concert hall.
He looked back up into the chamber, so many faces staring down at him that it made his time teaching at the university seem like an intimate gathering. But he didn’t have time to be uncomfortable. “Does anyone have questions? There are no stupid questions, and if you have one you don’t ask, you are stupid, because, as I have said several times, we will all die for your ignorance. Contrary to the conduit’s confidence, the fact that you are channeling the mana matters almost entirely. You pull too much, it’s over.”
“As a motivational speaker, Sir Altin, I have to say you are terrible.” This of course came from the conduit, whose rotation upon the ottoman had him facing the other way, and since he did not deign to turn his head, it seemed as if he were speaking to himself in his own reflection in the chamber’s giant bronze doors. He waited until the rotation brought him around far enough that he could look up at the Galactic Mage and raise his eyebrows at him with an irritated air. “Would you like me to get them in a more suitable mood for this undertaking, now that you have sucked all the enthusiasm from the room?”
“No. I would not.” He reached a hand out toward the conduit, his fingers opening and closing twice in a row, rapidly, demanding. “Give me a seeing stone.”
“I am perfectly capable of casting the seeing stones for Citadel, young man,” said the conduit.
“Give me the gods-be-damned stone,” Altin nearly yelled. “There is no time.”
The violence of Altin’s command startled the normally implacable conduit, and he reached into a leather satchel that he wore and pulled out a diamond the size of an avocado seed. “No need to get snappish, young man. I won’t tolerate much of that, you know.”
Altin ignored him, and in the span of an instant the diamond was gone, leaving the conduit to stare, blinking, into Altin’s empty hand. Altin glared down at him and gave the barest of nods, all but imperceptible. “Now, Conduit, you may take us to where that stone has gone.”
The conduit was still gaping wide-eyed into the space where the seeing stone had vanished without Altin’s having uttered a single word, but he pulled himself together straight away. “Cebelle, let Aderbury know we’re moving,” he began, speaking to the concert’s primary telepath. “Teleporters get ready. Seers get me that stone. Let’s go, people, let’s go.”
Orli watched in awe as the concert hall mages came to order, and then, looking rather like slices of a colorful pie in the sections where they sat together in matching guild robes, they all moved in unison by school. The gray-robed teleporters sat swaying slightly in their seats, their hands on their laps, their lips sequenced so perfectly they might well have been reflections of a single mouth. The seers in their ochre robes also sat swaying and singing a single song, though their hands were uniformly out before them with fingers splayed, reaching together as if searching for something. The other sections of the hall sat completely motionless, coming at the call of the conduit to stone-like rigidity, no one even so much as twitching or tapping a toe. All eyes were closed, all waiting for the call for mana channeling if required.
“Aderbury is with us now, Conduit,” reported Cebelle. Her eyes were still closed as she spoke from her place at the front row of the seers’ section, veins like purple roads on a parchment map visible through the thin skin of her ancient eyelids. “We can go.”
Conduit Huzzledorf looked straight up then, right into the center of the tentacles twisting slowly above him. His eyes, unlike the concert mages’, were wide open, staring upward as if he saw something in the core of those groping ropes that mortified him.
Orli watched him and could not stop the reflex that made her grip Altin’s arm tightly in her hands. There was something terrifying in the conduit’s look. Something psychotic, she thought. Suddenly she was frightened of the idea that the red-clad man with the crazy fringes of hair and the slightly insane look in his eyes would be the one casting the spell that would carry her across the universe. He struck her as unstable, broken even, his wild-eyed expression seeming near madness or, perhaps worse, mad with a love for power.
And then it was done. His eyes snapped shut, then reopened purposefully, blinking a few more times. He looked to Altin and announced, “All right, we’re here. Now hand them out, my boy.”
Altin ignored the pejorative, but this time Orli did not. It ignited her anger inexplicably. She nearly leapt upon the man. “Knock it off with that crap already,” she snarled through clenched teeth, her face pressed almost into his. “Sir Altin is here to save your sorry ass and the asses of everyone else on your damn planet. Show him some respect. You forget whose ship this is and what your place is on it.”
Altin put a hand on her shoulder and smiled at her, shaking his head in a way that said it was okay. He didn’t want to have to explain the nature of conduits to her, and there was no amount of reason that would make one of the enigmatic mana handlers behave socially anyway, at least not in any consistent or predictable way, much less get them to properly abide by the structures of military discipline. Even the Queen put up with a great deal of insolence from them. They were a sort of magical celebrity, oddities that were well aware of their usefulness and, like mad artists in their way, prone to misbehave.
Fortunately, they were also the sort of creatures who did not care if they were yelled at or insulted very often, at least not when it was convenient to be so cavalier, and so Conduit Huzzledorf only laughed a merry laugh and clapped Altin on the arm, saying, “There’s a keeper for you, lad. She’ll fight your fights for you, and you can lie about the house eating confectioner’s delights and reading low literature as you please.”
Altin ignored that as well and nodded down to the box sitting at Orli’s feet. “Let’s hand them out.” He stoop
ed and opened the chest, then loaded his pockets with as many as he could carry comfortably. With his pockets full, and his robes hanging heavily for it, he then took a large handful to carry as well. “I’ll start up there,” he said, pointing with his chin to the pie-slice section of seats to the left of the concert hall’s large brass doors. “You start back there, Orli, and Conduit, if you would be so kind as to split the difference and get the healers’ and illusionists’ sections.”
The conduit made a big fuss about being told what to do by “children,” but he complied, filling a pouch on the front of his satchel with handfuls of the Liquefying Stone until there were only two layers of the crystals left, stacked neatly in rows in the bottom of the chest. Orli picked the chest up, which was still quite heavy, and went to the section of the room she’d been assigned to, climbing the stairs and directing the nearest mage on each side of the aisle to take one and pass it down until the whole row had been given a stone.
“Not one breath of magic,” Altin must have said at least twenty times before the whole room had been equipped. “Don’t let them touch your skin until you need them. And not one single syllable of magic until you are all linked to Conduit here. If anyone so much as tries to light a pipe with a summoned flame, we will all be incinerated on the spot.”
Everyone nodded that they understood, and any marginally close observer of humanity could see fear on more than a few faces in the room.
“Let’s get the illusion up, Cebelle,” Altin said, “so everyone can see what we are up against. Don’t touch the Liquefying Stone while you do it.”
The old woman nodded at him, as if grateful for that reminder, redundant as it was, but the conduit protested in his way. “Sir Altin, if you don’t need me anymore, perhaps I shall go have a nice hot bath.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Conduit,” said Orli. “There are two worlds at stake. Give it a rest.”
“No, he’s right,” said Altin, trying to be diplomatic. “I’m sorry, Conduit. You know your job. Please carry on.”
Counting that a victory, the conduit looked as if he might press the issue, but Orli took a step forward looking as if she might throttle him on the spot, so he refrained. He returned to his seat upon the slowly turning ottoman, and tilted his gaze up into the air above him expectantly.
The low notes of Cebelle’s chanting soon became the only sound in the room, the lights dimmed, not that Orli could have identified where those lights came from to begin, and soon the large glowing globe of red Mars filled a space in the air ten paces in diameter above the conduit’s head. Orli heard several mages mutter, “Luria,” under their breath.
Mars rotated slowly in the illusion, which struck Orli as being much like a hologram, and orbiting the planet were its two small moons, Phobos and Deimos, both visible just now. Orli wondered if, given the absence of the giant Hostile in the scene, perhaps it had left. But then that too entered the image hanging in the air, dwarfing the two rocky lumps of Mars’ circuitous companions like a starship might dwarf crew carriers docked next to it in port. And even in this illusionary image, seeing how big the Hostile beside Mars was triggered more than a tingling sense of dread. She nervously wondered if perhaps all of Citadel’s mages, even with Liquefying Stones in hand, could possibly be enough. Had she been too hopeful in assuming it? While they had been in the cavern on Blue Fire’s world getting the yellow stones, Altin had made it more than clear that in all likelihood, the mages were going to kill themselves.
“Let us begin,” Conduit Huzzledorf said, holding aloft one of the big diamonds from his satchel. “Seers get this seeing stone now, before it goes. Sir Altin tells me it may disappear fairly quickly once it arrives at the sun. Apparently that thing is rather hot.”A few mages laughed at his joke, but most were either too nervous or too terrified to be amused.
So began the process of getting place for the teleporters, using a seeing stone to find a place of familiarity into which they were going to try to teleport that vast Hostile orb. Before they could send the orb into the sun, they had to know where they were going to send it, and they all had to know it if they were going to send something that big that far. That was step one.
The first seeing stone was cast, but as soon as it was gone, all the seers let out a collective moan, the sound of a hundred disappointed casters all as one.
“Try it again, people. I told you to look fast. Pay attention.”
As Altin waited, leaning against the stool in the central ring of seats where the lead casters from each school sat, a circle that ran around the conduit’s ottoman, he got a telepathic nudge from Aderbury, who was far above the concert hall, manning his post in the tower that looked down upon the assembled redoubts and out into the space beyond Citadel’s protective shell.
“My people want to take the redoubts out and go help the fleet ships fighting above Earth,” Aderbury said. “They’re getting antsy up here. Do you need us for this?”
“Tell them they need to wait. We need to contact Director Nakamura first. Our redoubts will still be fired upon if they go out right now. Wait till this works. Orli will contact them on her mirror and make sure they are going to cooperate.”
“If they don’t?”
“Well, let us hope they do. I’ll let you know.”
Aderbury let go of the tendril that connected their thoughts, and Altin turned to see how the conduit’s seeing went. Another of the enchanted diamonds had just left Conduit Huzzledorf’s hand. Not long after, three voices shouted, “I’ve got it.” One other said, “I think I saw it too.”
Conduit Huzzledorf looked annoyed and, in a little fit of impatience, mussed the already-spastic frazzle of his hair with his hands. “For the love of Mercy, we’re going to spend all day on the easy part,” he growled. “Let’s do this properly, people, so we can get to the Liquefying Stones.”
Altin wanted to jump in with a warning, to point out that eagerness was a terrible idea, but he knew that would be a bad idea too. There was no point in pointing it out again, nor was there any point in arguing with the man. Besides, who knew what kind of difference having a conduit could make while using the Liquefying Stone. Perhaps Altin was worrying about nothing now—though he sorely doubted it.
He was half tempted to take Orli back to Tytamon’s tower, just in case something went horribly wrong, but he’d vowed never to leave her like that again. They would face the danger together from now on—together, so that he could keep her safe.
Several more attempts to cast seeing stones into the sun were made, each in hopes that the seers could find them before they evaporated, and eventually all but four of the concert hall seers had found the place before the diamond was gone.
“Good enough,” the conduit announced. “You four can sit it out since you obviously can’t handle it.”
Orli’s mouth dropped open in her horror at how rude that was, but Altin was nodding that he agreed. They didn’t have time for weakness or incompetence because they didn’t have time at all. Now was not the time to mollycoddle people just so they could feel good about themselves.
“Healers get your sections now, and watch for injuries,” ordered the conduit. “Diviners, stay ahead of them so they don’t have to guess. Seers link the new place. Teleporters shape it; Sir Altin has the lead. Everyone, in order, you know how channeling works. Let’s go, let’s go.” He watched as the sections shuffled and shifted in their seats, nerves calming, and finally the room was ready for the attempt. “Get your stones, people. Let’s hitch the teams and quarter this titan.”
Altin waited until he saw the rest of the room had closed its eyes. He glanced back at Orli one time and smiled, a wan thing with love in his eyes, then turned to face the conduit who was watching him, waiting with an eyebrow raised. Altin nodded and closed his eyes.
Orli watched the two exchange the look, and she saw, or thought she saw at least for a moment, a look of humility flash upon the conduit’s face, as if, in that one moment, he was willing to let Altin know that he too
was afraid. She couldn’t decide if that made her feel better or not, but at least it made the crimson-clad man seem human again.
Twelve mages fell over in their chairs immediately. Orli saw them fold as if they’d been gut-punched, first one, then two more, then the rest, with no particular pattern as to where it happened around the room. Just slump, slump, slump, twelve of them nearly all at once. None of them moved again. Nor did anyone get up to help. She thought about running to them herself but decided that might make things worse, getting in the middle of the concert like that.
Then began the wait. The time spent waiting for the seers to find the sun had seemed long enough, but now the time simply went on and on. After a while the beating of her heart subsided some, the fear spawned by the slumping mages exchanged for curiosity. She marveled at the haunting beauty of the song the concert hall magicians made. It was like a chorus of accident. No words together, no direction at all, and yet, there was a harmony in it that seemed to suggest orchestration anyway.
She listened to it for a time, but soon the sameness of it lost its hold on her. It became background sound like frogs and crickets chirping in a springtime field or the soft crash of surf over the course of a day at one of Prosperion’s many beaches. Thinking of that set her to watching Altin as he cast. She wondered what he was doing right then, wondered what was going on in his mind, what he was seeing. He sat motionless, where most everyone else in the room swayed. She wanted to walk around to the front of him, to look into his face, but she was afraid she might disturb him somehow. She was way too terrified of interrupting something to move, so instead she closed the lid on the empty wooden chest and sat down on it, using it for a low stool. She leaned against the half wall that separated her from the front row of the concert hall mages, staring mainly at Altin’s back. She watched him for a time, but then came a shout from across the room, a man in purple robes, an illusionist, seemed to bark then slumped forward in his chair.
